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“This entire job has been a shit show.”
“It hasn’t been easy, but I don’t think I’d call it a shit—”
“You going to tell him you and Demetrius are husbands as well as business partners?”
Cody scowled. “Yes. Seeing him just caught me off guard, that’s all.”
“Uh huh.”
“Hey, you know what I’ve been through to get to this point,” Cody said, his temper rising. “I struggled with things between Demmy and I for a while, I admit, but I came out to the people we care about. Including you, by the way, and the rest of this damn town. It’s not my fault Devin missed the announcement.”
“All right, you’re right,” Jugs said with a sigh, pulling the snake’s head away from his face with a sneer. “I’m worked up about us dealing with a forty-foot python.”
Cody scoffed. “This is not a forty-foot long snake.”
“It will be when I tell people about it.”
“I’ve said this before, but you know Agatha went to vet school, so she knows how to accurately measure things, right?”
Devin returned with the baseball duffel in hand. Made of black canvas, it was meant to carry bats and gloves, so it was tall with an opening at one end that tied shut. He held it steady as Cody manipulated his end of the snake into the bag then stepped back, shuddering as Jugs pushed the top half and, finally, the head inside. Jugs closed the top of the bag in a tight choke hold, and Cody tied it shut. They placed it in the bed of the truck, and Cody secured it in place with bungee cords.
“Now what?” Jugs asked, forearms resting on the side of the truck’s bed and gloved hands hanging over. “Probably shouldn’t take it out to the pond.”
“Might take care of that damn raccoon,” Cody grumbled.
“Parson’s Pond?”
Cody looked at Devin. “That’s right. It’s where we take the majority of the critters we catch.”
“Oh, cool. I swim out there sometimes.”
Cody felt a ribbon of anxiety sizzle along his spine. Had Devin been out there earlier when Cody and Demmy had been skinny-dipping?
Jugs made a face. “People swim there?”
“Sure, lots of people do.” Devin shrugged. “Well, they used to. I haven’t been out there for a swim for a few weeks.” He eyed the duffel bag pulsating like some kind of canvas blob. “You’re not going to let that thing go out there, are you?”
“No, we’re not,” Cody said, then clapped a hang on Jugs’s shoulder. “Jugs here is going to call his veterinarian girlfriend and ask her to recommend a place we can take it.”
Jugs muttered something Cody didn’t quite catch and moved away, removing his headlamp, pulling off his work gloves, and unzipping his coveralls. Cody removed his own headlamp and gloves, then unzipped his coveralls and shrugged out of them. He felt immensely cooler, even in the humid August air. After pitching the sweaty coveralls into the bed of the truck, he faced Devin and took a breath.
“Hey, Devin, look, I wasn’t—”
“Nope, don’t even think about it,” Devin interrupted him.
“What?”
“No discount. I’m paying full price, even if I gave you the duffel bag and helped get the snake off you.”
Cody chuckled. “Okay. Well, thanks.”
“Of course. You take charge cards?”
“I do.”
“Come on back to the house.”
Cody grabbed the clipboard with a stack of receipts from the truck’s cab and followed Devin back inside the house into the kitchen. Quartz countertops with a long island and dark blue cabinets made Cody feel as if he’d stepped into an ad from a home remodeling catalog. Devin pulled a card from his wallet and handed it over. As the payment processed on his phone, Cody wrote up the receipt.
